


Sublimation

by skullshy



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Light BDSM, Mentions of Rape, and shouldn't sleep next to kegs of gunpowder, don't let the bdsm tag scare you, gentle dom vex, high maintenance anxiety-ridden sub percy, just a scientific study of how many cuddles I can fit in one fic, oops my hand slipped there's smut, so much praise kink, that really can't be good for your health darling, there's no punishment or training, this is basically one long aftercare fic, vex'ahlia's guide to the care and keeping of your insomniac trauma-ridden boyfriend, who has a habit of blowing things up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:47:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23074207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skullshy/pseuds/skullshy
Summary: The first time Percy realizes he’s a sub is in the hands of the Briarwoods.After that, he locks his nature under a thousand locks, and throws all the keys into the Lucidian Ocean.
Relationships: Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III/Vex'ahlia
Comments: 45
Kudos: 238





	1. Circumferences

The first time Percy realizes he’s a sub is in the hands of the Briarwoods.

He had been a late bloomer all of his life, but most de Rolos were, so it hadn’t bothered him that he was eighteen and still had no hint of his orientation. Julius hadn’t had an orientation until he was 23, and suddenly snarled at a man who was picking on a young lady at her debut party. Julius had punched the other man and taken the young lady to safety with his newly bloomed dom instincts. 

Percy’s parents had only laughed and threw an elaborate wedding for the couple. They had been open and gentle with their children about orientations, unlike most nobility. They told Percy and his siblings over and over that they would still be loved, sub or dom or nothing at all.

Sometimes Percy wishes they hadn’t been so compassionate.

Then he would have been prepared, at least, for the Briarwoods.

The Briarwoods tortured him until a haze came over him— he started crying, trying to rub his face on their shoes.

Sylas lowered the whip in his hand, and blinked. 

He looked at Delilah. 

Delilah looked back. Then she exploded into laughter. 

“The little de Rolo whelp is a sub!” she howled.

After that, the torture got much worse.

They forced him back into that strange haze— which Percy later learned was called a subdrop, and used it to degrade him in any possible way their wicked minds could imagine. 

They were creative, psychopathic and ruthless. And there was nothing that Percy would not have begged to do under that haze.

Somehow Cassandra broke them free.

He doesn’t remember how they escaped, because all he could feel was the welts on his back, and the burning deep inside of him, where he had been violated to his core. 

He remembers bright, bloody arrows and the cold shock of falling into the river. 

Percy emerges from the river as a different person.

The combined trauma of the torturing, losing his family and home, wipes out his ability to feel anything. He never has subdrops again, and he doesn’t lose his composure any more. He also can’t feel happiness, or joy or any other emotion, but he takes this as a relief.

Anything, anything is better than allowing his body to be used against him, his emotions played like a harp in the devil’s fingers.

And if he makes flaming black powder boxes so that no one can take him like that again?

People have had worse reactions to trauma.

He even makes it in and out of jail without any reactions. Fights dragons and beholders and undergoes a thousand stressful situations where his sub nature could have risen to the surface. He’s unconscious a dozen times, knocked about and beaten bloody.

Nothing.

In early spring, they stay at Greyskull Keep for a few weeks to recuperate. Frost still covers most of Emon, but here and there hopeful pockets of green grass poke through. The rains in the south have tapered off, signaling the slow return back to warmth and light.

In the spirit of spring, Vex decides that she’s going to reorganize Percy’s room for him because “it’s a hazard to your health, darling”. Sure, Percy has knocked over some gunpowder all over the floor, and probably shouldn’t keep his spare gun metal and liquid fire so close to his bed. And maybe the book stacks are getting a little tall, and he should put away his expensive clothes so he doesn’t spill anything on them. 

But when Vex cleans his room, he explodes at her. He knows his reaction is well out of proportion to what happened, but he’s overcome with a panic he can’t control, which results in lashing out at her. Vex is so hurt that she doesn’t talk to him for a few days. 

Percy buries himself in his workshop, hands shaking and nostrils burning. He knows he’s behaving irrationally, but every time he sees his changed room, he freaks out all over again. He can’t stop gnawing over it, as if his changed room is a symbol of all of the life changes that have happened unwillingly to him all at once. Everything moved feels like a punch to the gut, a scab that he is forced to scratch every time he opens the door.

On the second day of Percy and Vex’s fight, Vax comes and scolds him for upsetting his sister. Percy nods, agrees with whatever Vax says, and then tears up the skin on his arms the minute Vax leaves. Percy spends the night in the workshop berating himself and not sleeping, poking at the scratches on his arms. 

On the morning of the third day, Percy makes his way out of the workshop to the breakfast table, so that he can apologize to Vex and maybe finally get some rest.

He’s standing at the table, trying to get his hands to work so that he can consume coffee without spilling it everywhere— when he feels it.

His subdrop comes upon him so hard that he blacks out.

He doesn’t hear his coffee mug shatter to the ground, or hear Pike and Keyleth’s shouts of concern.

All he feels is panic and darkness.

—  
Pike reaches Percy first, climbing up over the table to get to him. He’d been looking a little pale as he mixed a hint of cream in his coffee, but she hadn’t wanted to ask because she knew that Vex and Percy had a spat.

Pike takes Percy’s pulse— alarmingly fast, and his breath, coming out in little huffs. Then Keyleth comes over and helps Pike turn Percy over on his side, just in case he felt sick. Slowly, his eyelids flutter, and he comes back to consciousness.

The first thing that Pike notices is that Percy’s eyes are dilated almost all the way, and his skin is warm to the touch. There is a red rash on his throat, where his sub hormones are secreted, and there are scratch marks on his arms, from where he must have been punishing himself.

“Get Vex,” Pike hisses to Keyleth, who charges off to find the half-elven girl.

They both race down the stairs, and skids to a halt in front of Percy. Behind them come the rest of Vox Machina, concerned about the commotion.

Vex opens her mouth and shuts it several times.

“Well, aren’t you a dom?” Pike demands, when Vex makes no move towards Percy. “Can’t you help him?”

“I— I’ve never, I mean— I’ve had subs, but I’ve never helped one through a subdrop!” Vex stammers.

Percy curls in on himself, pressing one hand against his ear to block out the noise, and the other to dig bloody gouges into his arms.

Vex takes one look at the blood crusting under Percy’s fingernails— and it’s as if a gun is cocked in her mind. She shoves everyone out of the way, and pulls Percy’s fingers away from him, so he can’t keep scratching himself.

“Hey,” she whispers to him. 

He shudders, but keeps trying to regain use of his fingers to scratch.

“Hey, it’s okay, Percy. Everything’s fine.”

Pike tosses her a blanket and hustles everyone out of the kitchen, responding to Keyleth’s “but I don’t understand what a sub is” with a hurried “I’ll explain it to you later, Kiki.”

Vex wraps him in the blanket, tight enough that he can’t get his arms free. Then she covers his ears and shades his face. Vex remembered something about the last sub she had explaining how overwhelming the senses were during a subdrop, as if the whole world was on fire with light and sound. 

Given that Percy relaxes into the blanket, there must have been something to that depiction.

Vex waits with Percy until her legs get cold on the stone floors of the kitchen, and then decides the cold floors can’t be doing Percy any good either. He isn’t scratching any more, but he is shivering, his eyes still dilated past their normal circumferences. She’s strong enough to lift Percy and carry him, so she takes him back to her own room, and beds him down in as many as blankets and pillows as she can find.

Vex lays next to him, more to monitor him than to provide comfort. But as Percy’s breathing settles and evens out, his eyes close, and Vex finds herself asleep, curled around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I found this in my abandoned works folder and realized it already had eleven pages? At that point, might as well finish it off and post it. XD
> 
> It's not my best work, and you will definetly see the sub/dom/omegaverse themes probably pop up somewhere else because my favorite breakfast food is fucking with gender/sex constructions.
> 
> But here y'all are. XD


	2. Thorns and Briars

They sleep for a long time. Neither had slept well these past few days.

Vex wakes up to someone poking her on the nose.

“Whuh?” she mumbles. “Go t’sleep, Trinket.”

“I am not Trinket, and I’d like my breathing ability back, please,” a voice beneath her wheezes.

Vex shoots up, throwing blankets every which way. Percy takes the opportunity to scramble out of bed himself. With shaking fingers, he dons his velvet jacket and shoves his feet into his shoes, ignoring Vex’s noise of indignation. 

“I am— I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience,” Percy stammers, not even looking her in the eyes. “I, of course, will not bother you in such as way—…”

“Percival,” Vex snaps, using her Dom voice for the first time in her life. She counts herself as a fun Dom, interested in pleasure and flirting, not demanding and stern. But Percy looks the color of sour milk, and his trembling legs can barely hold him up.

Percy freezes, and looks her in the eyes.

Vex gets out of bed, dressed only in her loincloth, and stand right in front of Percy. He darts his head down, eyes trained on his shoes.

“Percy, if you have another dom, I will gladly release you into their care,” Vex says softly. “But I don’t think you do, do you?”

“I’m f-fine,” Percy says. “I don’t n-n-need a dom.”

The irony that he can barely get the words out without slurring his words is not lost on Vex.

Vex goes to put her hand on his cheek, perhaps to steady him— and he jumps out of his skin. Vex can smell his anxiety, like lightning just before it touches the ground. She can see the fear in his eyes and the tremors that wrack his body like a leaf in the wind.

“Tell me why not,” Vex orders.

Percy shivers, and tries to say anything, anything but the truth. He tries to remind himself that just because she’s using her Dom voice on him doesn’t mean he has to obey—

“They h-h-hurt me,” he gasps out. “And I can’t— I can’t t-t-trust anyone to—…”

He tries to wrench himself out of Vex’s grip, but Vex is a great deal stronger than he is, even on his best days.

Vex folds her arms around Percy, forcing his head to rest on her shoulder. She strokes through his shock of white hair, back and forth. She can feel his body vibrating through her arms. 

“Rule number one,” Vex whispers in his ear.

He tenses.

“I will never, ever hurt you,” Vex swears. “I won’t hit you or take away your food, or make you do something you don’t want to do. I think you’ve had enough trauma for one lifetime, don’t you?”

Percy gives a shudder, and then his legs give out. She sinks to the floor with his weight wrapped in her arms.

“There you go, you’re going to be alright,” Vex murmurs, trying to get his racing heart under control. 

She murmurs nice things for a while, but Percy just won’t fucking relax, even when she’s holding him and has her fingers in his hair. Vex runs through her mind on things that subs like; it’s been a long time since she’s had a sub, and she’s mostly had one-night stands rather than long-term relationships.

In the back of her mind, she remembers that some subs like to be praised, that it helps them feel grounded. 

“You’re a good boy, a very good boy for trusting me,” she tell him.

Percy stops shaking, and looks up at her with eyes so dilated that they only have a tiny ring of blue in them.

“I’m not— I’m not good,” he tells her, his voice slurring again. “I’m very, very bad.”

Vex scoffs.

“Well, whoever told you that is not your dom right now, right?” Vex explains. “So if I say you’re a good boy, then you are.”

The wheels in Percy’s head churn excruciatingly slow when he’s in the midst of a subdrop.

“Yes?” he answers. Then, “No?”

Vex holds in a laugh. 

“Let me do the thinking right now, darling.”

“Mmhh, alright,” Percy mumbles.

Vex begins massaging the sub gland at his neck, still rash-red and engorged.

Percy goes cross-eyed, and finally relaxes. His eyes roll back into his head, and lays against her, limp and boneless.

Vex hauls Percy back into bed, keeping a firm hand on his sub gland. A lot of subs don’t like being touched there, but if it’s keeping Percy under and relaxed, Vex will do what she must. 

Vex sinks down into the blankets and pulls Percy on top of her so she doesn’t smush him again. 

She keeps rubbing the gland, enjoying Percy’s blissed out look and the way his normally intent features can’t even focus on her face, eyelids fluttering and flush high on his cheeks. 

Percy moans, and buries his embarrassed face into her shoulder, and suddenly she can feel it. Percy’s hard, his hips stuttering her thigh.

On one hand, she has a gorgeous, aroused sub squirming on top of her.

On the other hand, Percy is going to kill her when he gets his faculties back.

Apparently, sub glands are an erogenous zone, which explains why the subs Vex had been with previously didn’t like being touched there. Vex would have totally known this if she had any real relationships or if the elves had been anything except disapproving; she feels overly warm and stupid.

Vex isn’t a virgin, and while she isn’t as skilled or renown as Scanlan is, she knows her way around a hand-job. But when she slides her hand down Percy’s pants, she feels the monumental weight of Percy’s trust in her, that she will do him no harm when he is in such a vulnerable state. 

She does a perfunctory hand-job, and when he spends in her hand, she gets up and rinses it off in the wash basin. When she comes back with hand towels and a sponge to clean off Percy, he has his arm over his face and looks very much upset.

Vex puts the towels and sponge on the night stand, and gingerly sits on the edge of the bed.

“I hate my body so much,” Percy croaks out.

“No, it’s my fault, I didn’t— I should have asked—” Vex starts.

“It’s fine,” Percy says, even though his voice is cracking and he is clearly not “fine”. “I just hate— losing control. I wasn’t expecting— I haven’t had a subdrop since I was nineteen, and— “

“Percy,” Vex says, aghast. 

Not having a subdrop for years could lead to serious health issues. She could remember Gilmore lecturing Vax about it; he’d tried to go the herbal route, suppressing his subdrops with whatever barely legal substances he could find in the markets. Vex had fretted about it, but hadn’t told him no— they couldn’t afford professional doms for him, not when money was so tight.

A few weeks later, she wished she had pressed him harder, when she went to wish him good morning, and he wouldn’t wake up. 

She had taken Vax to Gilmore’s, and he had been revived— but there were a few days where his life had teetered in the balance.

Percy removes his arm from over his face and looked at her, sheepish and unhappy. 

“I know, it’s quite terrible,” he admits to her. “But there’s no one— I still get nightmares, about what they did to me—”

Revelation comes across Vex like a sick fever. 

Them. The Briarwoods. 

Percy was trying to say that he had been he had been raped and tortured during his subdrops by the Briarwoods. 

Suddenly a great deal many things about Percy’s behaviors and skittish nature make sense to Vex now. The way he both craves touch and fears it, the tiny flinch he has when someone gives him an order— the way he wears his clothes as a shield and keeps his guns strapped firmly to his hip.

“Oh Percy,” Vex says, because what else can she say to that? 

She clutches his clammy hands in her own, as Percy tries to drift to sleep once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm allergic to my houseplant and only realized today that it was my source of itchy, abject misery. XD
> 
> ....anyway, that's why this chapter was later than usual. XD


	3. Guiding Through the Dark

Things go back to normal, or as normal as they can be, when Vex feels like her entire body is a compass arrow pointed at Percy.

She’s heard of doms being attuned to a particular sub (usually the one they end up marrying), but it’s never happened to Vex before. It’s unnerving— but Vex can’t deny that it’s also useful. 

She can feel when Percy’s at the edge of his rope, long before he even says anything, when he’s excited or when he’s wrecked with insomnia. She can feel it in her chest like a deep ache or bruise. 

Vex is also running out of excuses to explain why she seems always around the corner whenever Percy is feeling upset or despondent. As her usual solution to an emotionally uncomfortable problem, she simply makes no mention of it, and pretends it doesn’t exist. 

Percy is just as much of a coward about these things as she is; he can face down dragons, and handle gunpowder exploding in his face, but having a conversation about his feelings is too difficult. 

Vax finds it hilarious for about a week, then becomes exasperated.

The others must notice Vex and Percy dancing around each other, orbiting like stars that never quite touch. Luckily, Pike demands that no one talks about, so no one does. When Pike declares something not up for discussion, it is not discussed.

The only exception to this is Scanlan, who takes Vex aside one night, on their way out of Emon, and gives her book with one of his trademark winks, and then disappears before Pike can call him out for a foul.

At first Vex thinks it’s a dirty book, like the kind that Scanlan and Grog trade back and forth between each other, like the kind that nobody lets Keyleth read, even though she’s infernally curious about them. As it turns out, the book is a practical guidebook for doms. It answers some questions Vex didn’t even know she had (touching a sub’s gland does actually release hormones, she finds out), and it’s refreshingly nonjudgmental in comparison to what the elves had taught her.

The elves, of course, loved their strict hierarchies, and despised anything that fell outside of them. Vax, a sub who liked punching and killing things, was an abomination who would never find a mate; Vex, a dom who preferred flowers and kissing to whips and beatings, was a failure.

The rest of the world was clearly much more open to different kinds of sub and doms, if the book Scanlan had given her was any indication.

The book also talked about something called a bonded feedback loop, which was apparently a fancy way of saying that the more comfortable and happy Percy was, the better off Vex was. A lot of the suggestions, like putting your scent on your sub’s blankets, involved touching Percy’s things, which after the room incident, was an absolute no.

But Vex tries in other ways. She makes sure that Percy’s bedroll was the closest to the fire, and near Keyleth and Vax, because he like snuggling near them. Vex makes sure that Percy gets the biggest helping of food, other than Grog, who by his goliath nature needed four or fives times the amount of food the rest of them needed.

She knows that Percy likes being touched, but never asks for it, so she tries to be within reaching distance without crowding him out. 

While Vex had meant these efforts to make Percy feel better, they actually improve Vox Machina as a whole. Kiki decides that Vex touching Percy more means that she can touch Percy more, and takes to hugging him, tugging on his sleeve, and any other act of physicality her happy-go-lucky nature can get away with. 

Vex thought she would mind the extra competition, but there’s something about seeing Kiki and Percy curled up together makes her feel satisfied.

Strangely, Vax seems to have no problem with Keyleth sleeping entwined with Percy either, even though he and Keyleth are in love with each other. He kisses Keyleth goodnight like always— hesitates, and then brushes back Percy’s hair and kisses him on the forehead as well. 

Percy is astounded by this, but judging by the pink in his cheeks and his slight smile, he is very much pleased by the gesture. 

The image of Percy blushing haunts her dreams for many long nights.

Percy doesn’t have another subdrop when they are out in the wilderness. He’s more carefree, less constricted by his duties and propriety when he is in the vast wilds that make up most of Exandria. The cities they visit remind him that he is Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo the Third; the grassy plains and enormous mountains remind his that he is also Percy, tinker and explorer and man with needs and wants just as the rest.

To Vex’s surprise and delight, those needs and wants lead Percy to her; slowly but surely, he responds to her efforts. He smiles at her when she sits next to him at breakfast— he lets her watch him take apart and clean his guns, shows her how to fix her saddle when it tears, and doesn’t shy away from her contact. 

Maybe not everything is alright— there is still darkness in the world, evil that needs to be routed out. But Vex thinks that maybe it doesn’t need to be quite right, when she has Percy by her side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a little shorter, as a transition chapter. I'm actually kind of blown away by the response to this-- y'all have been coming out of the woodwork and it's really cheered me up. 
> 
> I know things are really stressful with the pandemic going on, and for a lot of people, fanfic is their safe haven from the real world. So everyone please take care of yourself and enjoy reading if you're stuck at home. Best love and wishes. :D


	4. Tears and Feathers

Vax is furious that Vex went and married Percy without telling anyone, but honestly, what else was she going to do? Whitestone is an estate, and estates cannot be held by anyone except a dom. Vex knows that it would kill Percy to lose Whitestone, his only link to what was left of his family. And Cassandra needs a save place to heal and develop a designation, and neither of these things were going to happen with greedy, fat dom lords panting over Whitestone like it was a prize deer in a hunt.

The wedding’s not a hardship, especially when Percy goes pink and stutters through his vows, and they’re kicked out of the Chapel of Pelor because Vex wants to see if the blush goes all the way down.

(It so totally does).

Vex doesn’t understand until… after. Vax was mad because he knew that would not survive the slaying of Vecna, and he wanted to walk his sister down the aisle. She’s angry that he never told her, then guilty, and so full of grief that she feels she will drown with in it. It’s so him, hiding the truth because he hated seeing her cry… and he never got to walk her down the aisle, because she was too busy saving Percy and the world and Whitestone to notice the Raven Queen slowly pulling him into her grasp.

Vex lies awake in Percy’s bed and mulls it over. Percy is the only bright spot in the darkness that swamps her; he finally let her into his bed, after extracting agreements that she wouldn’t move or touch anything. Her irritation at his tools lying everywhere is mollified by the fact that he lets her bring her own blankets, and adds them to his nest.

Percy has only had one subdrop since they moved permanently to Whitestone, and it was a gentle, soft affair, more kisses than hard fucking (though there was some of that as well). Percy’s physician said that he probably will never have regular subdrops as he should, but Vex can’t bring herself to mind. They both have so much duties and passions that subdrops only every once in a while works for them.

Not that Vex has been a great dom lately, with her grief over Vax’s death consuming her. Even food tastes like ashes in mouth. She knows Percy is worried about her, but every time she wakes up, she realizes that she will never see her twin again.

She gets out of bed. Percy makes a questioning noise, but settles back to sleep when she kisses his forehead. The waning moon is out, bathing the balcony of their room in a cool glow. Sleep will not come for her tonight, it seems.

Vex grabs her dressing gown, lined with fur for the frigid north, and walks to the balcony door. It faces east, looking over the Dawnfather River and the Parchwood beyond that.

A raven is perched on the balcony ledge.

White hot anger suffuses Vex. She grabs the nearest hammer off of Percy’s desk and throws open the door.

In the raven’s place is Vax. He looks different— a raven feather mask obscures his face, his wings are glossier than they ever were when he was alive, veined with white. Yet his eyes are still the warm blue that she sees in the mirror every morning.

Vex flies into his outstretched arms. For a moment, she thinks she will go through him, like a ghost. But his arms are solid, for the time being. It makes her cry that much harder.

Vax squeezes her tighter, and then murmurs, “We only have a few minutes, sister. Look at you, honestly!”

Vex gives a watery chuckle, knowing very well how she’s looked these past few weeks. Her hair’s been a mess, her eyes dark-circled and her sun-kissed skin pale. She looks like the ghost he truly is.

“You carry new life in you,” Vax tells her solemnly. “For the child’s sake, you must put your grief to rest— I will always be here, even if you can’t see me.”

Vex wipes the tears streaming down her face and gives a snort. “Well, that does explain why the pancakes have tasted terrible lately.”

But the grief crashes over her again. “I miss you so much—” she choked. “I can’t— I don’t—”

Vax holds his twin’s head in his hands, leaning down to do so. “Vex, look at me,” he demands, until she finally meets his eyes. “I am not gone. I’m a little farther than I use to be—”

She sobs at that, even as he continues.

“But I’m here with you, all the time. You have to know that. I am in the strength of your bow, the caw of every raven, the smiles of your children. I am not gone.”

Vex nods tearfully as he slowly disappears in front of her, her chin still warm from where his hands were.

“Vex?” Percy calls from the bedroom. “Isn’t cold outside?”

Vex turns around and hurries back into the warmth of their room.

“Percy,” she says breathlessly. “We need to do some remodeling.”

“Alright,” Percy agrees sleepily. “But can we draft the plans in the morning? It’s not even dawn yet.”

Vex laughs and snuggles back into bed with her sub husband. She can’t wait to see his face when she tells him the news.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, may have stepped on y'all's feels a little there. *hands out kleenex* 
> 
> I haven't watched the wedding one-shot episode, but I heard from a little raven birdie that there's some cameos, so I thought I'd do my own. XD We have one last epilogue chapter, and then it wraps up. Thanks for loving on my little fic, y'all are amazing!!


	5. Made Anew

Vesper Elaina de Rolo loved climbing trees. So did Pocket, her pet bear— but Pocket was a lot better at getting down from trees than Vesper was. He was at the bottom of the old sycamore tree, pawing at the bark anxiously.

Vesper was stuck at the top, unable to figure her way down. A storm was fast approaching the Parchwood and the branches that had been steady twenty minutes ago now shook like one of Papa’s machines.

Pocket whined again. The sky was getting darker, and Mama would be wondering where she was.

Vesper wiggled her foot down. The branch seemed solid, so she put her other foot on it—

With a snapping sound, the branch broke, and Vesper began slipping through the branches.

She barely had enough time to scream when she was caught by the back of her tunic. Above her was an unlikely savior— a raven twice as big as normal. He held her tunic in his beak until she was able to grab onto sturdier branches.

“Thanks!” Vesper beamed at the raven. “That was nice of you.”

The raven fluffed his feathers and let out a caw that sounded like a scolding.

“Yes, yes, I’m not supposed to be climbing trees without Mama or Papa to watch,” Vesper admitted. “But I was bored!”

The raven nudged something out of the tree. It fell right were Pocket had been. Pocket led out a moan of displeasure, but the raven just cackled.

“Ooo, it’s shiny!” Vesper exclaimed.

She climbed the rest of the way down the tree and picked up the steel dagger. It was glowing orange, and was warm in her palm. 

“Pocket, look it! We can use this to explore the dungeons!”

Pocket moaned again. He did not like the idea of exploring the dungeons, especially when Papa had warned them to stay away.

“Aw, what’re you, a scaredy bear? Come on!”

Vesper and Pocket left the raven behind. 

The raven laughed, and flew away. He’d like to see Vex’s face when she saw Vesper with the dagger… but for now he was content with the knowledge of his mischief.

His Queen called, and she had much more for him to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end! Thanks everyone for reading this, it was a lot of fun to revisit these characters, and I'm always happy when I manage to squeeze out more than one fanfic a year (yes, yes, I'm super slow XD).


End file.
